3:10 PM,
Oct. 20, 2013

Greta Garbo in 'Ninotchka'

Written by

Harold Meyerson
| Special to The Washington Post

The Republican Party has reached its Ninotchka period. Ninotchka, you may recall, was the eponymous Soviet commissar played by Greta Garbo in Ernst Lubitsch's 1939 MGM comedy, released one year after Stalin's show trials resulted in the execution of all of the tyrant's more moderate predecessors in the Soviet leadership. "The last mass trials were a great success," Ninotchka notes. "There are going to be fewer but better Russians."

Like the Stalinists and the Jacobins, today's tea party zealots have purified their movement - not by executing but by driving away those Republicans who ...